I have a app that builds it's gui up from nested panels and have run
into the following issues:

BoxLayout aligns all components to the right in inner panels (I want
it to the left) how can I correct this?

Even though I set Min/Max/Preferred size explicitly on inner panels
they components are resized when I grew/shrink the content pane... how
do I allow resizing the window but disallow component resizing?

The amount of vertical gap between BoxLayout components changes as the
container panel is changed in size... how can I force this not to
happen?

Oh and a side question how do I change the color of a JProgressBar